Turning Point In India, Triumph In Philippines For The Rights Of Women

By Walden Bello

Source: China Post

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Making the biggest headlines were the massive demonstrations in New Delhi and other cities in India provoked by the brutal gang-rape by six men of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in a moving bus in the Indian capital. The crime, which saw the victim suffer extremely serious wounds in her genitals and intestines, proved to be the trigger for the release of popular anger that had built up over the years over the rise in violence against women.

Even as India's gender equation may be in the process of transformation, the women's movement registered a historic victory in the Philippines with the passage of the Reproductive Health Bill. The law, which makes family planning an obligatory policy for the current administration and for future ones, was passed Dec. 17 in the House of Representatives and the Senate in the teeth of ferocious opposition from the super-patriarchal Catholic Church hierarchy.

Key provisions of the new law include, among others, the provision of free or cheap contraceptives to poor couples, institutionalization of sex education for students from the sixth grade up, the establishment of maternal care facilities in state-run hospitals, and provision of reproductive health counseling and treatment for women in all hospitals, including those suffering from postabortion complications, while ensuring respect for the rights of health professionals who cannot offer these services owing to religious belief.

The passage of the RH bill was seen widely as an enormous debacle for the Catholic Church, to which some 80 percent of the population nominally belongs. For 14 years, the Church hierarchy had thrown everything, including the proverbial kitchen sink, at the campaign to have the bill enacted into law. How did the RH advocates manage to beat an institution that has been a massive force in Philippine society for nearly 500 years?

National accounting systems which are used for calculating growth as GDP are based on the assumption that if producers consume what they produce, they do not in fact produce at all, because they fall outside the production boundary.

The production boundary is a political creation that, in its workings, excludes regenerative and renewable production cycles from the area of production. Hence, all women who produce for their families, children, community, society, are treated as ‘non-productive’ and ‘economically’ inactive. When economies are confined to the market place, economic self sufficiency is perceived as economic deficiency. The devaluation of women’s work, and of work done in subsistence economies of the South, is the natural outcome of a production boundary constructed by capitalist patriarchy.

Secondly, a model of capitalist patriarchy which excludes women’s work and wealth creation in the mind, deepens the violence by displacing women from their livelihoods and alienating them from the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend - their land, their forests, their water, their seeds and biodiversity. Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world, can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable. The resource grab that is essential for “growth” creates a culture of rape – the rape of the earth, of local self reliant economies, the rape of women. The only way in which this “growth” is “inclusive” is by its inclusion of ever larger numbers in its circle of violence.

I have repeatedly stressed that the rape of the Earth and rape of women are intimately linked, both metaphorically in shaping worldviews, and materially in shaping women’s everyday lives. The deepening economic vulnerability of women makes them more vulnerable to all forms of violence, including sexual assault, as we found out during a series of public hearings on the impact of economic reforms on women organized by the National commission on Women and the Research Foundation for Science,Technology and Ecology.

National accounting systems which are used for calculating growth as GDP are based on the assumption that if producers consume what they produce, they do not in fact produce at all, because they fall outside the production boundary.

The production boundary is a political creation that, in its workings, excludes regenerative and renewable production cycles from the area of production. Hence, all women who produce for their families, children, community, society, are treated as ‘non-productive’ and ‘economically’ inactive. When economies are confined to the market place, economic self sufficiency is perceived as economic deficiency. The devaluation of women’s work, and of work done in subsistence economies of the South, is the natural outcome of a production boundary constructed by capitalist patriarchy.

Secondly, a model of capitalist patriarchy which excludes women’s work and wealth creation in the mind, deepens the violence by displacing women from their livelihoods and alienating them from the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend - their land, their forests, their water, their seeds and biodiversity. Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world, can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable. The resource grab that is essential for “growth” creates a culture of rape – the rape of the earth, of local self reliant economies, the rape of women. The only way in which this “growth” is “inclusive” is by its inclusion of ever larger numbers in its circle of violence.

I have repeatedly stressed that the rape of the Earth and rape of women are intimately linked, both metaphorically in shaping worldviews, and materially in shaping women’s everyday lives. The deepening economic vulnerability of women makes them more vulnerable to all forms of violence, including sexual assault, as we found out during a series of public hearings on the impact of economic reforms on women organized by the National commission on Women and the Research Foundation for Science,Technology and Ecology.

I woke up in Paris last weekend to the news of the Delhi protests. I felt relieved. People are not just watching or suffering quietly anymore, I thought to myself. I wanted to be there too, out in the streets of Delhi. For all those times I had to suffer sexual harassment in Delhi, I want to be part of this churning for change now.

My Parisian friends asked me what was going on. And I told them about the new “national outrage” and the stories that had been stoking the anger. That’s when I realised I needed to make a list. What was informing my idea of what’s going on? These stories making it to the headlines, do they have something in common?

Yes, they do have one very obvious thing in common. They are all “sensational” news items. They are either:

-gang rapes;
-cases with voyeuristic descriptions of how women are stripped or paraded naked;
-rapes that involving a celebrity;

-rapes ending in suicide, murder or mutilation.

By highlighting only these sensational stories, we are making only these rapes seem “real” and making other, more common forms of rape, such as acquaintance rape or marital rape, seem “unreal” or not serious enough to require strict action. Let’s not forget the crimes against women that are being committed every day but not making it to headlines. The suffering of those women also deserves outrage. The Indian media has made a huge effort to break a common rape myth: that women “invite” sexual assault or harassment and that their life is “ruined” if they are raped. This has made a difference to the way in which we talk about victims and survivors. We slam the Khap leaders for saying rapes happen because women fail to do enough to shield themselves from uncontrollable male desire. We make Sheila Dikshit eat her words for saying a woman who is out very late at night is being too adventurous. We give room to “survivors” on television rather than feel sorry for “wrecked victims”. That’s perfect. But we still haven’t realised that the way we talk about the perpetrators of sexual crimes remains seriously flawed.

I woke up just past midnight with a bolt. My six-month-old son was crying. He has a cold – the second of his short life–and his blocked nose frightens him. I was about to get up when he started snoring again. I, on the other hand, was wide awake.

A single thought entered my head: Chief Theresa Spence is hungry. Actually it wasn’t a thought. It was a feeling. The feeling of hunger. Lying in my dark room, I pictured the chief of the Attawapiskat First Nation lying on a pile of blankets in her teepee across from Parliament Hill, entering day 14 of her hunger strike.

I had of course been following Chief Spence’s protest and her demand to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to discuss the plight of her people and his demolition of treaty rights through omnibus legislation. I had worried about her. Supported her. Helped circulate the petitions. But now, before the distancing filters of light and reason had a chance to intervene, I felt her. The determination behind her hunger. The radicality of choosing this time of year, a time of so much stuffing – mouths, birds, stockings – to say: I am hungry. My people are hungry. So many people are hungry and homeless. Your new laws will only lead to more of this misery. Can we talk about it like human beings?

For approximately three years, our governments, the banking cabal, and the Corporate Media have assured us that they knew the appropriate approach for fixing the economies that they had previously crippled with their own mismanagement. We were told that the key was to stomp on the Little People with “austerity” in order to continue making full interest payments to the Bond Parasites — at any/all costs.

Following three years of this continuous, uninterrupted failure, Greece has already defaulted on 75% of its debts, and its economy is totally destroyed. The UK, Spain and Italy are all plummeting downward in suicide-spirals, where the more austerity these sadistic governments inflict upon their own people the worse their debt/deficit problems get. Ireland and Portugal are nearly in the same position.

Now in what may be the greatest economic “mea culpa” in history, we have the media admitting that this government/banking/propaganda-machine troika has been wrong all along. They have been forced to acknowledge that Iceland’s approach to economic triage was the correct approach right from the beginning.

What was Iceland’s approach? To do the exact opposite of everything the bankers running our own economies told us to do. The bankers (naturally) told us that we needed to bail out the criminal Big Banks, at taxpayer expense (they were Too Big To Fail). Iceland gave the banksters nothing.

This is the conclusion of a four-part series, "How Petraeus Created the Myth of His Success." Read Part One, "How the Myth Began - Petraeus in Mosul," Part Two, "How Petraeus Quietly Stoked the Fires of Sectarian War Without Getting Burned," and Part Three, "Petraeus Rising: Managing the "War of Perceptions" in Iraq."

Managing the "war of perceptions" in Afghanistan ultimately proved more difficult for David Petraeus than it had in Iraq.

As the raids were increased by orders of magnitude, the number of civilian casualties also exploded. From May 2010 to February 2011, SOF teams fired shots in 1,256 raids out of a total of 6,282 raids, killing 2,844 "insurgents," according to data released by ISAF. But with rare exceptions, night raids target a single individual in their homes only, so those figures indicate that as many as 1,500 people killed in the raids were civilians who had not been targeted.

The targeting was based on intelligence that was so deeply flawed that the SOF killed a former Taliban who had become a human rights investigator working with the European Union in the firm conviction that he was in fact the Taliban's shadow government for Takhar Province - merely because the man's cell number showed up on the list of those with whom the real shadow governor had been in contact. The intelligence officials deciding who should be targeted had not bothered to make the most obvious inquiries to check their cockeyed theory that the two were one and same man.

A high proportion of the targets of raids were simply people whose cell phone numbers showed up in the US surveillance system because of contact with someone else suspected of being an insurgent. As he had done in Mosul in 2003, Petraeus authorized a huge increase in the relatively less violent "cordon and knock" raids on only the thinnest evidence of connection with the insurgency, as well as raids targeting individuals identified as Taliban officers which involved killing the men in their beds next to their wives.

The Israeli government has called the attack on Gaza killing 170 Palastinians and 6 Israelis "Pillar of Defense". German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that Israel has all rights to defend itself. But granting an occupier the right to retaliate against those occupied is absurd, says Gilbert Achcar. Gaza is widely seen as an "open air prison". The Netanyahu government frustrated about not getting a green light from Obama to attack Iran chose Gaza as the "scapegoat". Meanwhile the Egyptian policy toward Israel under president Morsi hasn't changed compared to Mubarak. Ceasefires do not solve the problem, says Achcar. To regain control over the region the U.S. has renewed its alliance with the fundamentalist Muslim Brothers during the 60ies.

David Goessmann: The Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, who was involved in the release of Gilad Shalit, told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari was assassinated just hours after he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the ceasefire. Your comment?

Gilbert Achcar: I think there is a wide consensus even within Israel itself, at least the critical opinion within Israel, on the fact that this is an electoral war. Basically. I mean, Netanjahu has called for elections, he has fixed a date for elections and people know that regularly now elections are preceded by actions of this kind, that governments in place think will bring more votes to them. And the fact is that Netanjahu has been betting on - everyone knows that also - the victory of Romney in the US elections and has been campaigning now for quite a long time for a green light for a military strike on Iran. And he was confronted by a refusal of the president of the American administration to grant this green light and actually even the previous administration of Bush. We know from an investigation done by the New York Times he had refused to the government of that time at the end of 2008 a green light also to attack Iran. So, having been frustrated with the reelection of Obama in the United States the scapegoat was for Netanjahu Gaza. This is the only rational explanation, if you want to find a rationality in this kind of aggression for what is going on. And it has been denounced as such by a lot of Israelis, those who are critical of all that or reject the kind of policies that are implemented by Netanjahu. One should emphasize that this is a far right government, this is not a centre-right government. What you have in Israel is a far right government, that is when you think far right in Germany or France or whatever. Well, the equivalent is in power today in Israel and people have to keep that in mind.

The latest round of climate negotiations in Doha once again demonstrated the sheer lack of cooperation, goodwill and willingness - or ability - of the world's governments to share responsibility for tackling climate change. Since the epochal failure to reach a global deal at Copenhagen in 2009, less and less attention is paid by the media and the general public to these byzantine and shadowy UN climate talks. After three years of further wrangling by governments with little to show, it required serious scrutiny from ordinary citizens to determine what was actually being agreed upon at COP18. Was it merely an agreement to make an agreement in 2015? An agreement based on emissions cuts and pledges for funding that will remain inadequate and far too late to deal with the climate chaos that is already upon us? And one that won't come into effect, in any case, until 2020?

As usual there was no shortage of analysis pointing out the growing gap between evidence of global warming and action to tackle its causes and consequences. Dozens more reports were published that highlighted the dangers of sustained inaction, not least UNEP's Emissions Gap report that argued it will be impossible to cap global warming at 2 degrees Celsius if present trends continue - thus making it unfeasible to wait until 2020 to begin stringent emissions reductions. There was were even dire predictions about future climate breakdown from within the corridors of power, not least from the International Energy Agency, the CIA, a multinational business consultancy (PwC), and - with the worst prognostications of all - the World Bank.

These alarm bells from the establishment were accompanied by first-hand evidence of an already climate damaged planet, with 2012 marked by extreme weather events and climatic disasters across large parts of the world. This included the flash melting of Greenland's surface ice; historic droughts in Russia, Australia and the US; dramatic flooding in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Thailand and China; and of course the recent devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy, as well as Typhoon Bopha that fatefully struck the Philippines as COP18 delegates were in mid-negotiation. Just as the climate talks got underway, the Global Climate Risk Index revealed that many of the worst natural disasters of last year were also the most severe ever experienced by those countries affected. Less developed countries remain generally more affected than industrialised nations, the Index reported, while the overwhelming majority of disaster-related deaths are in the developing world.

Notice these violations of banking regulations are always presented as victimless crimes or crimes that only affect investors, never people who lose jobs or homes or how they impact on the economy worldwide.

Most of the coverage does not link all these financial crimes to the larger effect and impact they have had on the world.

Slowly, these concerns are working their way into the media but without much of the larger framework presented in a dire global economic report on just how deeply the world economy has been wounded.

The UN reported that it will take until 2017 before jobs come back to pre crisis levels, if they ever do. Global recession could easily deepen given the problems with the US, European and, now, the Chinese economies.

The biggest players in the food industry—from pesticide pushers to fertilizer makers to food processors and manufacturers—spend billions of dollars every year not selling food, but selling the idea that we need their products to feed the world. But, do we really need industrial agriculture to feed the world? Can sustainably grown food deliver the quantity and quality we need—today and in the future? Our first Food MythBusters movie takes on these questions in under seven minutes. So next time you hear them, you can too.